God and Jetfire

Starred review from May 11, 2015
Seek’s memoir is an unforgettable and exquisitely written narrative of motherhood in our time. Seek was an unmarried, Tennessee-born 22-year-old, studying architecture in Cincinnati, when she found herself pregnant and at a confusing crossroads. Though her lover (a Norwegian named Jevn) proposes to her, circumstances draw her down another path. After much research and rumination she finds a couple who agrees to an open adoption. After she gives birth, however, Seek savors the early days with her newborn, discovering that placing her child with the extraordinarily understanding adoptive parents is excruciatingly painful. With each visit she makes to the adoptive family, from her child’s infancy to age 12, she writes movingly of her close-up views of her son. Seek’s prose is lyrical, at times heart-wrenching, as she deeply explores her pain, regret, and longing. The author provides an informative view of open adoption (its advantages as well as its drawbacks). There is nothing prescriptive or commonplace about this true story of a mother who has to learn—as all parents must—both how to embrace, and how to let go.

April 1, 2015
If giving up a child for adoption leaves a void in the mother's life, what happens when she remains an active part of the child's life afterward? That void must be carried with her. When landscape architect Seek became pregnant at age 22, she and her boyfriend opted for an "open" adoption, an arrangement in which the biological and adoptive families maintain some degree of contact. Finding a suitable couple presented numerous challenges, but giving Jonathan to his new parents while remaining part of the family mosaic proved much harder. A counselor warned the author that the "window of open adoption would open both ways." Just as she would see any difficulties the adoptive parents faced, her own pain and ambivalence would no longer be private. Seek writes in a style that feels intimate one moment, sterile the next, and she sharply renders her feelings for her son; giving birth, "I felt that my soul had stepped out and sat beside me." The author marveled at the insignificance of her architecture major compared to the thrill of "building" a human being. Yet descriptions of the birth father, Jevn, are hard to decipher. Seek broke off the relationship and insisted on adoption, but her frustration with Jevn comes to the fore often, despite (or because of?) some lingering fondness. Numerous moves for school and work overlapped with visits to Jonathan and his growing family; the author drives home the point that even as life moves on, it's a life cleft in two. What might have been was reduced to catching up on the latest developmental milestone, comparing her son with his siblings, and waiting for him to pose the inevitable question: why? She ultimately takes heart seeing her son thrive in a happy home, recognizing that she could not have offered the same stability. An unflinching look at the consequences and rewards of open adoption, written with care and precision.